Sound and vision blog

PhD placement students, Andrew Booth and Rowan Campbell write:

Are there any words your family use that no one else has heard of? Can you guess what fruckle, woga, elpit and pivoed mean? This week, Andrew and Rowan look into this phenomenon, with lots of examples from visitors who donated to the Evolving English WordBank! In the process, we explain how new words are made and how they might spread, via a (very) brief history of the English language.

Tweet us: @VoicesofEnglish

This week’s ‘What’s the feature?’ used a clip from:

Millennium Memory Bank Recording in Chelmsford, Essex. BBC, UK, rec. 1999 [digital audio file]. British Library, C900/04060. Available: https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Millenium-memory-bank/021M-C0900X04060X-0100V1

Interesting links:

Evolving English WordBank: https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Evolving-English-WordBank

Back slang: http://www.victorianweb.org/history/slang2.html

Hybrid words: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/the-monstrous-indecency-of-hybrid-etymology/

How to make up new words: http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/06/19/neologisms_lexicon_valley_guide_to_making_up_words.html

The English Project. 2008. Kitchen Table Lingo. Lonfdon: Virgin http://englishproject.org/activities/kitchen-table-lingo

Linguistics at the Library Episode 6

PhD placement student Rowan Campbell writes:

It sometimes strikes me just how much chance and canny timing have to do with the way we experience the world. While cataloguing audio files, I came across the following speaker (born 1944, London) who tells us that her great-grandmother used to say “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency”, which then became a family saying for when you have had enough to eat.

C1442 uncatalogued ELEGANT SUFFICIENCY

It is fairly common for kitchen table lingo to be submitted to the Evolving English WordBank, and having never heard it before, I assumed it to be one of these idiosyncratic family phrases and thought no more of it.

But the universe must have decided that this wasn’t good enough, and presented me with the phrase the very next day. To my offer of a second helping, a dinner guest replied, “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, any more would be superfluity.” This was a phrase used by their grandmother at least two generations later than attested by the woman above, and I was now intrigued enough to dig further into where it might have come from.

It seems that I’m not the only one who is curious about it – a Google search reveals more questions about it than answers, with many believing it to be a phrase or joke unique to their family. It is attested in places as far-flung as the UK, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, Sweden, Norway and a Swiss finishing school; variations of it crop up in novels by Margaret Atwood and Fred Chappell, and even more recently in radio and television shows The Archers and Last Tango in Halifax. So much for having died out in the sixties – although it does seem to exhibit age-grading tendencies, with each generation associating it with their grandparents.

Something about its verbose formality may have always seemed old-fashioned, and Frederic G. Cassidy’s investigation suggests that it rose out of the need to have politely appropriate stock phrases to hand, since “the spur of the moment can urge a speaker to disastrous infelicities.” The association with etiquette is taken further by one Guardian commenter who describes a class-based trickle-down effect whereby irony in the aristocracy is mistaken for gentility by the middle classes, then adopted by the “upper lower class” in a “valiant attempt” to better themselves. This is also implicit in the clip above, where the phrase immediately follows an ‘elocution lesson’ and exhortation to ‘speak properly’ from the speaker’s grandmother.

“An elegant sufficiency” first appears in James Thomson’s 1728 poem Spring, albeit in a context devoid of food. In the years between then and 1840, where Cassidy traces it back to, it seems to have become something of a pre-digital-age meme. Cassidy explains that it became “fashionable” to “invent new, amusing elaborations” on the two-part formula outlined above – much like the humorous and self-replicating concepts known as memes since the commercialisation of the internet in 1995.

In the North American context, this appears to have given rise to variations of “My sufficiency is fully surancified; any more would be obnoxious to my fastidious taste.” The word at the core of this has a variety of spellings and pronunciations, presumably due to not existing in any dictionary, but seems to have fossilised into phrases like sufficiently suffonsified and elephants and fishes eggs.

Unfortunately, however, I am not sufficiently suffonsified by my investigation. How did this concept proliferate and propagate without the internet, or at least written records? Will my millennial generation finally finish it off with our disregard for etiquette? Or will this blog help to enshrine it and give it a new lease of life for future generations?

This week's selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Peter and Iona Opie, 1959) lists numerous regional variants for ‘truce terms’ – the code word used to withdraw briefly from a playground chasing game or to seek immunity from capture – including barley in the West Midlands, skinch in the North East, kings in Yorkshire, cree in South Wales and the West Country and scribs in Hampshire. The Lore of the Playground (Steve Roud, 2010) confirms continued use of many of these terms alongside more mainstream national variants such as time out, paxies and freeze and previously unrecorded local forms such as twixies in Essex, jex in Croydon and bugsies in Devon. 

When we invited visitors to the 2012 Evolving English exhibition to submit contributions to the Library's WordBank, children's playground games proved a particularly rich source as can be seen from the contributions here of fainites from London, squadsies from Leicester, skinchies from Skipton and thousies from Bournemouth. It's also worth noting how the contributor from Bournemouth uses both it and tag to refer to a basic chase game as this, too, is known variously across the country as it, he, tig, tag, ticky, dobby, touch, king etc. and that the contributor from Leicester is unsure whether the past participle of tig is regular (i.e. tigged) or strong (i.e. tug).

Fainites (C1442/1873)

Squadsies (C1442/1487)

Skinchies (C1442/993)

Thousies (C1442/351)

You can hear over 100 recordings made by Iona Opie from the 1960s onwards of children demonstrating and discussing playground games across the UK.

Follow @VoicesofEnglish and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

PhD placement students, Andrew Booth and Rowan Campbell write:

This week is a bumper episode because Andrew and Rowan are joined by Rosy Hall, who completed her PhD placement at the British Library in 2017! We discuss island communities and why these are linguistically interesting, before hearing about Rosy’s own research on the island of Bermuda in the north Atlantic.

Follow Rosy on Twitter: @RosyHall

Tweet us: @VoicesofEnglish

This week’s ‘What’s the feature?’ used a clip from:

BBC Voices Recording in Knowle West, Bristol. BBC, UK, rec. 2005 [digital audio file]. British Library, C1190/07/02. Available: https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices/021M-C1190X0007XX-0201V0

Further reading:

Schreier, D. & K. Lavarello-Schreier. 2011. Tristan da Cunha and the Tristanians. Portland: Battlebridge Publications.

Wagner, S. (ed.). [forthcoming]. Varieties of English in the Atlantic: Small Islands Between the Local and the Global (Benjamins Varieties of English Around the World series)

Wolfram, W. & N. Schilling-Estes. 1997. Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Okracoke Brogue. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Hill. J. 1995. Mock Spanish: A Site For The Indexical Reproduction Of Racism In American English. [Online]. Available at:: http://language-culture.binghamton.edu/symposia/2/part1/

Linguistics at the Library Episode 5

PhD placement students, Andrew Booth & Rowan Campbell, write:

What happens when lots of languages and dialects come into contact with each other? This week, Andrew and Rowan discuss contact effects in super-diverse cities like London, and what happens to English as more and more people speak it around the world. We also answer a question from Twitter about the noises we make in conversation to show that we’re listening.

Tweet us: @VoicesofEnglish

This week’s ‘What’s the feature?’ used a clip from:

Millennium Memory Bank Recording in Birmingham. BBC, UK, rec. 1999 [digital audio file]. British Library, C900/18580. Available: https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Millenium-memory-bank/021M-C0900X18580X-1600V1

Links & studies mentioned:

Multicultural London English databank: http://linguistics.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/linguistics/english-language-teaching/databank-of-spoken-london-english/

Donahue, R. T. (1998). Japanese culture and communication: Critical cultural analysis. University Press of America.

Cheshire, Jenny, Kerswill, Paul, Fox, Susan et al. (1 more author) (2011) Contact, the feature pool and the speech community : The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 151–196. ISSN 1360-6441 http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/75321/1/Emergence_paper_for_JS_23_2_11_singlespacel.pdf

Oxford Dictionaries – 10 ways speakers of World English are changing the language https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/09/25/10-ways-speakers-of-world-english-are-changing-the-language/

Linguistics at the Library Episode 4

PhD placement student, Rowan Campbell, writes:

If you’ve been listening to our podcast (Shameless Plug #378902), you just might have noticed that I, the Scottish one, love glottal stops. This is the sound that’s often written as an apostrophe where you would usually see a /t/ – for example, wa’er instead of water. But it actually has its own super-cool symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and looks a bit like a question mark: ʔ

That’s the first of many fun things I could write about the glottal stop, but rather than descending into a clickbait listicle (You Won’t BELIEVE These Seven Facts About Glottals!), I’m going to focus on something interesting that I’ve noticed in the Evolving English VoiceBank: non-native English speakers using glottal stops. Have a listen to these three clips – the first recording is of a young RP speaker, the second is a speaker from Cardiff, and the third is a woman whose native language is Czech.

C1442 uncatalogued female speaker

C1442X5884 Cardiff female (b.1982)

C1442X5843 Czech female (b.1986)

As you can hear, all three speakers use glottal stops, but the main difference is that the RP speaker only uses them before consonants and pauses, where they often go unnoticed:

… opened the biscuiʔ tin, took out a biscuiʔ, brought iʔ back upstairs …

Compare this with the Cardiff and Czech speakers, who replace every word-final /t/ with a glottal stop:

… opened the biscuiʔ tin, took ouʔ a biscuiʔ, broughʔ iʔ back upstairs …

This is something that is now quite common among young British speakers, but we might not expect to hear it from a non-native speaker - the glottal stop is a stigmatised and often-criticised variant of /t/when it occurs between vowels, and as such is not generally taught to language learners.  Presumably, this Czech speaker has noticed the people around her using the glottal stop and has incorporated it into her own linguistic repertoire. But why has she picked up on this feature in particular?

Some recent research on sociolinguistic variation amongst Polish-born teens in Edinburgh suggests that t-glottaling may be a relatively easy native-like feature to acquire. In Sociolinguistics in Scotland (2014), Miriam Meyerhoff and Erik Schleef examine two features that can vary phonologically and sociolinguistically:

• T-glottaling, or using the glottal stop /ʔ/ instead of /t/
• Apical (ing), commonly referred to as ‘g-dropping’ – for example, pronouncing the last syllable of ‘walking’ as ‘kin’ rather than ‘king’. These are represented phonetically as /kɪn/ and /kɪŋ/ respectively, as the ‘ng’ sound has its own (also super-cool) phonetic symbol: ŋ

Without wanting to overload you with new terminology, you might notice that these features also vary in linguistic complexity. T-glottaling is only phonological, in that it just requires knowledge of the phonological variants /t/ and /ʔ/. Both of these sounds can easily be substituted for the other at the end of any word. However, to ‘g-drop’ in a native-like manner requires additional knowledge, as not all ‘ings’ are created equal – compare the ‘ing’ in ‘king’ versus ‘walking’.  We can pronounce the last syllable of ‘walking’ as either /kɪn/ or /kɪŋ/, but we can’t pronounce /kɪŋ/ as /kɪn/ without changing the meaning of the word. Learning where we can and cannot ‘drop the g’ requires knowledge of both the phonological variants and the grammatical difference between these two types of ‘ing’.

As such, it’s harder to learn the relevant linguistic constraints for ‘g-dropping’ than t-glottaling, making the glottal stop a great candidate for non-native speakers to pick up – and that could be partly why the Czech speaker’s English sounds very fluent and native-like!

PhD placement students, Andrew Booth & Rowan Campbell, write:

Is the UK in danger of losing its wide variety of local accents? In the third episode of Linguistics at the Library, Andrew and Rowan investigate why we might tone down our accent when talking to people from different areas, and whether the media is making all British accents sound the same.

This week’s ‘What’s the feature?’ used a clip from:

Millennium Memory Bank Recording in Quorn, Leicestershire. BBC, UK, rec. 1999 [digital audio file]. British Library, C900/09097. Available: https://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/Millenium-memory-bank/021M-C0900X09097X-2100V1

Studies mentioned:

Eckert, Penelope. 2003. Elephants in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3): pp. 392-397. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9481.00231/full

Evans, Bronwen G. and Iverson, Paul. 2007. Plasticity in vowel perception and production: a study of accent change in young adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121(6): pp. 3814-26. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17552729

Milroy, Lesley. 2007. Off the shelf or under the counter? On the social dynamics of sound changes.  In Christopher M. Cain and Geoffrey Russom (editors): Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English, pp. 149-172

Gill, W. W. (1934). Manx dialect: words and phrases (No. 4). Arrowsmith http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/fulltext/md1933/index.htm

Linguistics at the Library Episode 3

PhD placement students, Andrew Booth and Rowan Campbell, write:

In the second episode of Linguistics at the Library, Andrew and Rowan discuss some of the differences between regional accents and ‘RP’ (Received Pronunciation), and why people might feel that they have to change the way they speak to work in certain jobs. Using clips from the British Library’s Evolving English Collection, we look at the concepts of stigma and prestige, and how social factors can influence the way we perceive accents.

Tweet us your questions! @VoicesofEnglish

This week’s ‘What’s the feature?’ used a clip from: BBC Voices Recording in Driffield. BBC, UK, rec. 2004 [digital audio file]. British Library, C1190/16/02. Available: http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialects/BBC-Voices/021M-C1190X0016XX-0201V0

Interesting links:

Have you experienced discrimination due to your accent? Submit your story to the Accentism Project: http://accentism.org/

Peter Trudgill’s piece on modern RP: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/trudgill.htm

Social Mobility Commission report: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/less-affluent-kids-are-locked-out-of-investment-banking-jobs

Prejudice against English teachers with Northern accents: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/research-exposes-prejudice-over-teachers-with-northern-accents/

Overt and covert prestige: https://linguistics.knoji.com/language-and-socioeconomic-status-overt-vs-covert-prestige/

Linguistics at the Library Episode 2